Below you’ll find the slides from my Physics Day presentations at Space Center Houston, embedded via SlideShare. I was doing the TED-style minimal text thing, so they’re probably not all that comprehensible on their own.

The event was supposed to have a pop-culture connection, so I decided to use space travel and extrasolar planets as a hook for talking about relativity, thus all the movie images near the beginning. The original idea I had was to look at different fictional ways of evading the ban on faster-than-light travel, but they wanted something more in the half-hour range than the hour-long talk I was originally envisioning, so I had to cut it way back.

The problem with using space travel as an intro to relativity is that it’s easy to come off as a total killjoy, saying we’ll never reach other stars. My original plan was to offer causality as a reason why you ought to be happy about the ban on FTL travel– if you can move faster than the speed of light, than some observers will necessarily see effects happening before their causes, which would just be bizarre. I didn’t really have time for that, though, so instead I offered the Global Positioning System as an example of a useful application of the constant speed of light. With a bit of local pandering, as you can see from the maps toward the end.

I probably overshot the actual level of the audience– I was aiming for the upper end of middle school, but one of the larger groups in the audience on Friday was probably in fourth grade, so it pretty much went over their head. On the other hand, though, one of the actual middle-schoolers there (I’d guess about eighth grade) came up to me after the talk and said “Thank you so much! That’s the first time any of this made sense.” Which is a great feeling.

(I said “Thanks, that’s really great to hear. And, have I got a book for you…”)

So, anyway, that’s how I spent the latter part of my week. And if anybody would like an hour-long talk about relativity using fictional space travel as a hook, drop me a line, and we’ll see if we can make that work, because I’ve got the idea, now, and would like to actually do it at some point…

Did you ever make the joke of “I put Houston in my GPS and got _____ instead”?

That’s the slides with concentric reddish circles over a map of Houston. The circles represent the 11 km/day error of GPS without correction for relativistic effects, and I noted that after a bit more than a week, you could be trying to come to see giant rockets in Houston, and end up out in the woods looking at a giant Sam Houston (in the national forest). That got some chuckles.

Books

You've read the blog, now try the books:

Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist will be published in December 2014 by Basic Books. "This fun, diverse, and accessible look at how science works will convert even the biggest science phobe." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "In writing that is welcoming but not overly bouncy, persuasive in a careful way but also enticing, Orzel reveals the “process of looking at the world, figuring out how things work, testing that knowledge, and sharing it with others.”...With an easy hand, Orzel ties together card games with communicating in the laboratory; playing sports and learning how to test and refine; the details of some hard science—Rutherford’s gold foil, Cavendish’s lamps and magnets—and entertaining stories that disclose the process that leads from observation to colorful narrative." --Kirkus ReviewsGoogle+

How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is published by Basic Books. "“Unlike quantum physics, which remains bizarre even to experts, much of relativity makes sense. Thus, Einstein’s special relativity merely states that the laws of physics and the speed of light are identical for all observers in smooth motion. This sounds trivial but leads to weird if delightfully comprehensible phenomena, provided someone like Orzel delivers a clear explanation of why.” --Kirkus Reviews "Bravo to both man and dog." The New York Times.

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is published by Scribner. "It's hard to imagine a better way for the mathematically and scientifically challenged, in particular, to grasp basic quantum physics." -- Booklist "Chad Orzel's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is an absolutely delightful book on many axes: first, its subject matter, quantum physics, is arguably the most mind-bending scientific subject we have; second, the device of the book -- a quantum physicist, Orzel, explains quantum physics to Emmy, his cheeky German shepherd -- is a hoot, and has the singular advantage of making the mind-bending a little less traumatic when the going gets tough (quantum physics has a certain irreducible complexity that precludes an easy understanding of its implications); finally, third, it is extremely well-written, combining a scientist's rigor and accuracy with a natural raconteur's storytelling skill." -- BoingBoing